Water-Resistant Smartphones: Pros and Cons

Today, when you’re choosing a new smartphone, you often see the IP code as one of their characteristics. It means that the smartphone is protected from dust or water to a certain extent. That’s true, most smartphone makers, including Samsung, Sony or Apple, fit their devices with water resistance gear. In the future, more smartphones are likely to be protected in this way. Water resistance seems to be a good thing but are there any disadvantages to it? Let’s find out.

Pros.These actually seem quite obvious. The statistics numbers speak for themselves. According to various studies and surveys, the chance that you accidentally damage your phone with liquids ranges from 10 to 30 percent. On average, it’s 20%, which means that every fifth smartphone user around the world sinks his phone. That’s when water resistance is so important. There are too many clumsy people, so they actually need their phones protected in the best way possible.

However, we must draw the line between two things here: water resistance and waterproofness. The latter implies that smartphones are completely invulnerable to water. In reality, they aren’t because your phone wouldn’t work if it spends a day on the bottom of the river. Our smartphones are resistant to liquids in certain circumstances. IP68 standard means that a smartphone is able to withstand water at 1.5m depth for 30 minutes. But we rarely immerse our phones at these depths. And that’s exactly where the cons come from.

Cons.The main question here is the following – is it worth spending your money on a feature that you don’t actually need every day? This is true – when you pay for a smartphone, you pay extra money for water resistance. Development and testing cost a lot and in the end add to the final price. For example, according to the Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, a smartphone price increases by 20-30% if you add water resistance gear. So, if you buy an $800 smartphone, you practically pay $200 for water resistance. That seems a bit much considering that it would cost less to repair the phone from liquid damage. Perhaps, buying a smartphone case would be more beneficial here.

To sum it up, we’d like to point out that the decision about buying or not buying anything is totally up to a particular customer. We only give our readers certain things to think about if they are choosing a new smartphone.